Re: New start up splash screen annoyance...

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     Experienced users don't use startup screen anyway. But we are trying to
>     make newbies happy.
>
> Not exactly.  We are trying to make sure newbies see some of this
> information, even if it makes them a little less happy.

The way to win people's heart is not by making them unhappy.

"Welcome! To learn about Emacs, press F1 C-a or use the Help/About menu."

Use an idle-timer to make sure that for the first 30 seconds of
idleness, regardless how Emacs has been started, this message is not
obscured for longer than 5 seconds (of course, unless the startup
screen _is_ actually being displayed which would be the default for an
Emacs started without command line options and not, say, loading a
desktop or doing other startup operations ending in a dedicated
buffer).

It may take weeks before the user visits the screen.  But when he
does, the important thing is that he does it because _he_ chooses to
do so.  So he'll be in a reasonably open frame of mind.

And we want him in a reasonably open frame of mind to teach him about
GNU.

The worst epithet used for some kind of obnoxiously advertising
software is "nagware".  We don't want to be grouped along with them if
we can avoid it at reasonable cost, and not permitting the user to see
the file he has explicitly specified to be seen is right in that
ballpark.  And "people will recognize that everything's different when
we do it because we are the good guys" never works.  Not in
government, not in software.

It does not matter whether we are the good guys or not: people will
hate us for it.  And that does not help our cause.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum